Nor are laymen the only ones that fall into such errors. Many physicians who prescribe new, widely-advertised preparations are likely to give those products credit for whatever favorable change may take place in their patients’ condition. This failing is not a modern one. In 1842 Dr. Benjamin Brodie wrote: “We have no doubt that many well-instructed medical practitioners have not sufficiently considered what course a given disease would take if it were left to itself; and as to others, it is not possible that they should have any real knowledge on the subject. With the majority of persons a recovery will generally pass for a cure.”
Greatly reduced photographic reproduction of a full-page Sanatogen advertisement appearing in the London Graphic. The Graphic was one of the London magazines that refused to accept an advertisement of the book issued by the British Medical Association, exposing “patent-medicine” frauds.
THE POWER OF ADVERTISING
While every physician is perfectly familiar with the facts just stated, it seems worth while to give them as a probable explanation of what is to follow. Within the last few years the medical profession and the public of this country have been asked to believe that a combination of cottage cheese—or its equivalent—with a small amount of glycerophosphates is capable, when sold under a proprietary name and with the right kind of advertising, of producing physiologic effects that are little short of marvelous.
The name of this elixir of life is Sanatogen, and it is doubtful if the history of modern advertising furnishes any more notable example of the commercial potentialities of publicity than that exhibited in the exploitation of this product. The Sanatogen advertising campaign is probably the most skilful piece of work of its kind ever done. On both sides of the Atlantic, every effort has been made to endow the advertisements with a dignity which, to those who know the very ordinary nature of the product advertised, is grotesquely out of keeping. Only the highest-class magazines and newspapers have been patronized; the “copy” has been so written as to appeal not to the ignorant but to the intelligent. Testimonials from men whose names are well known, even though by training and education they are incompetent to pass judgment on a product of this kind, and fulsomely laudatory letters from men whose education and training should have taught them better—both have been used with all the skill of the trained publicity man. In short, Sanatogen stands as a monument to the power of printers’ ink.
The claims for this product have already been referred to in The Journal, but it will do no harm to bring them again before our readers. Here are some taken from advertisements:
“The Re-Creator of Lost Health.”
“Sanatogen is ... a rebuilding food.”
“... revitalizes the overworked nervous system.”